There’s a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson, line by line explanation

 

The opening lines of “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” speak of the downfall of southern sunlight always visible on bright winter afternoons. But the unusual syntax of these lines is uniquely Dickinsonian. She compresses the two events together to emphasize that the angle of light she is describing can only be seen on winter afternoons.

In Dickinson’s sense “Heft,” stands for means “weight, heaviness, and ponderousness,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It can even signify the force of falling blows or the pressure of circumstances. Given this semantic environment, then, the word “oppresses” reinforces the sense of stress and torment arising from the depression brought on by winter’s south-western light. But note how Dickinson relates this sense of heaviness to “Cathedral Tunes.”  Describing light in terms of weight and sound is an example of synesthesia, that is, a fusion of different sensations. But linking light and sound with weight is also an example of metonymy, a figure of speech in which the name of one object or concept is used for another of which it is a part or to which it is related. Logically speaking, it is difficult to see how the elements of such a synesthetic experience are metonymically related. But on an intuitive level, the meaning of the image strikes the reader as profoundly revealing of the speaker’s attitude not only toward the “Slant of light” but also toward her experience with the Church.

Besides forming an oxymoron (an image that is incongruous or self-contradictory), the expression “Heavenly Hurt” suggests that the oppression the psyche suffers from winter sunlight has a transcendental source as does “the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.” As it brings a kind of unspeakable internal angst.

But whatever its cause, this resultant injury leaves “no scar.” Its wounds are not obvious to an external observer because of their location within the self.

 

The wound wrought by the southern light of a winter’s afternoon creates an “internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are—.” These two lines epitomize not only the crux of this particular poem but also Dickinson’s entire approach to writing poetry. “Where the Meanings, are” is the self’s interpretive faculty that ascribes signification to sensuous experience. Not only do all the scars of psychic abuse form there, but all interactions with the external world have also left their marks there. Conversely, this discriminative sense projects meaning

upon events and things outside of the individual. The cognitive process therefore primarily consists of assigning meaning to phenomena as they relate to the self.

 

But this depressing light resists all “instruction” and cannot be taught.then “Seal Despair” creates an even greater sense of spiritual emptiness or an indication of despair.

Yet another incongruity, “imperial affliction” joins “Heavenly Hurt” and “Seal Despair” to describe the devastating effect of the light. “Imperial” also has a special meaning in Dickinson’s vocabulary. In her letters and poetry, it often refers to the royalty of Deity, to which she attaches negative associations. In other words, what is normally thought of as good is actually quite the opposite.

Furthermore, the phrase “Sent us of the Air” presents the same ambiguity as “Heavenly Hurt”: the source of the “imperial affliction” is divine.

 

Employing Romantic poetics, Dickinson utilizes personification (dealing with inanimate objects as though they were human) to emphasize the disastrous enormity winter light represents. The silent “Landscape listens,” and even the “Shadows— hold their breath” as the oppressive light sinks in the West and darkness spreads across the land. The response of the landscape could embody the speaker’s sense of dread.

 

At the final setting of the sun and the coming of darkness, the reason for the desolation brought by winter’s “Certain Slant of Light” in the late afternoon becomes clear. In its “Distance” (or, its separation from the normal life-giving qualities of light) caused by its low position in the sky, this winter sun afflicts the speaker’s consciousness with the realization of death’s universal presence in the natural world.